Looking for the Reader

This entry is part 28 of 29 in the series Conversari

 

a found poem

My love sends instant
messages while she works:
“I hope the reader
might surface from
a sea of paper.

I lost the cable too, but it
has just emerged—
along with a packet of tissues,
a lip salve & a hair comb—
from beneath an
ancient layer on
my desk.”

Five minutes later:
“No reader yet, but
two keys, three
xd memory cards,
one paperclip, two buttons,
three elastic
bands & a pair
of buttonhole scissors.
A small stapler, two
passport pictures of A.,
a nintendo stylus, a
medication prescription
form & a folding
plastic fork. Oh,
& a reel of pink
sewing cotton.
But no reader.

The tissues, I see,
came from Hotel Metro Heights,
8/35 WE A. Padam Singh Road,
Karol Bagh, New Delhi-5.

Here’s a receipt for milk
& biscuits for work
which I should have
claimed in March
last year & an un-
signed credit card.
Here’s my prefect’s
badge from school, a short
piece of six-core copper wiring,
the top from a bottle
of bath ales & an
apple pip—make
that two
apple pips. No reader.

Another credit card I didn’t
know I had! This one
is signed. I suppose
I should cut
them up.”


See Rachel’s account and a photo of some of the found objects at twisted rib.

The map-maker’s colors

Connaissances:

Compared to the colours of flags which are brash in their symbolism, the map-makers colours are indeed more delicate. They reflect the precarious and unstable nature of countries and borders as defined by the changing character of those states. In some ways these delicate colours contradict the bold and simple ones of flags, challenging those who stick their flags in a new region of the map, by that means trying to claim it.

Between the plea and the imperative,

the throat constricts, prepares for singing—
It isn’t easy, this business of remembering:
naming the victims, counting the limbs, counting,
always counting; doing the work of matching
letters, numbers, captions, to the fading
images on microfilm or photograph. Sorting
in the archive, sleep-deprived, the dreaming
mind faces horror after horror, re-living
nightmares of lynching, burning, flooding,
bombing, raping, shooting— Not even the sleeping
dead refuse this mandate: even they are rising,
pulling at sheets. Rending threads, unwinding,
they make us speak or sing: demanding, demanding—

 

In response to thus: new year's resolutions: sing.

“Two Kinds of Boxes”: cliché and meaning in videopoetry

My first new videopoem of 2013 required more planning than is usual for me. The text is kind of the central poem in my Alternate Histories series. The footage speaks directly to its theme of rewinding and remaking the past. I’m also ridiculously pleased with myself for figuring out how to lie through video so as to make it appear that I am unwriting my footprints as I walk.

As curator of Moving Poems for almost four years, I’m all too aware of the fact that I am — as I say in my profile at Vimeo — a very amateur filmmaker myself. My command of the technical aspects of filmmaking is still pretty poor, and my image vocabulary is basic. But I do have the advantage — or is it a burden? — of knowing that some of the most obvious moving images have been done to death: shots from a moving vehicle, for example, or shots of walking feet (often female and barefoot). All my favorite contemporary videopoetry/filmpoetry makers have employed both these kinds of shots, some more than once. Hence, in part, my idea to include point-of-view footage (heh) of footprints rather than feet.

Is it fair to call such images clichés, though? Doing so smacks a little of the modernist scorn for writing about falling leaves or the moon. Moving through the world is a pretty inescapable aspect of existence, after all, and walking prompts thinking so readily it might as well serve as a metonym for it.

Moreover, a certain interplay between movement and stasis seems intrinsic to the videopoetry genre. Archibald MacLeish’s justly famous “Ars Poetica” says that “a poem should be motionless in time,” which while hyperbolic does capture the essential stasis in much modern lyric poetry (including my own): “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit,” states the opening line. By contrast, motion is the soul of film, and therefore I suggest that an unresolved tension between movement and stasis is the fundamental agon in poetry film, akin to the dynamic balance between life and death in any organism or ecosystem. (One thinks of the French for “still life,” nature morte.)

A look at the entire second section of MacLeish’s poem shows that the poem itself is (irony alert!) rather more interested in movement than in stasis, proving once again that it’s difficult to say anything about videopoetry that isn’t just as true of poetry as a whole:

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

Moving images have pretty much replaced celestial bodies as a central interest bordering on obsession in our culture, so perhaps it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to compare film in general to the role of the moon in this poem. Be that as it may, I think that makers of filmpoems and videopoems have long sensed a MacLeishian contest between stillness and movement as the ultimate expression of that creative juxtaposition between text and shot which distinguishes the true videopoem from other films or videos involving poetry. (Tom Konyves’ manifesto goes into some detail about the optimal sorts of text-image juxtapositions required for successful videopoems, but Konyves is far from the only poetry filmmaker to discover this principle.)

Immediately following the lines quoted above, in the third section of the poem, MacLeish writes: “A poem should be equal to: / Not true.” This too sounds as if it could be addressing videopoetry. Too close a match between text and image feels contrary to the allusive spirit of poetry (and of good film), but too random a match-up and that sense of “equal to” is lost. So in my video above, showing an actual black box, for instance, would’ve been absurd, but I thought I could get away with dark footprints. And when the poem talks about examining oneself, it seemed sufficiently suggestive to have the actor’s body move out of the frame and leave the now-unmarked snow bare for the closing credits.

Then again, that’s just the sort of move you’d expect from someone whose blog is called Via Negativa. It’s almost an apophatic cliché.

Brave Cake

Baked goods and bread, biscuits and ladyfingers. Who taught us they start to spoil as soon as they’re exposed to air? S was the first to rape her followed by the juvenile and then A. Bone marrow, bus driver, then later a second time. This will not rise. The yeast is too putrid, or too cold. Later, when she lost consciousness, there was another time. Another time. They’ve sifted her ashes and scattered them. Sacred river with muddy waters on whose banks so many bodies have blazed to the afterlife. Birds’ wings anointed with ash. Her father said she used to stop for a sweet on the way to school. The shopkeeper always relented. Ah what is a child but the sweetness of a hope before it vanishes like a dark stone into the depths of the gut? With his bare hands. With his bare hands he pulled them out. Fix this clearly in your mind as you approach the fire. Do not scald the milk, the delicate skin on which this spore should flower into nothing less than a thousand points of her name.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Palpable Beef and News: Youngest gang-rapist....